For It Is Man's Number: lynne ramsay

Showing posts with label lynne ramsay. Show all posts

Monday, 26 January 2026

Mubi Monday: Die My Love (2025)

I can easily see why director Lynne Ramsay wasn't initially keen to work on this film, which looks at the disintegrating mental health of a young woman after the birth of her child. Ramsay previously gave us the ultimate look at that kind of thing in We Need To Talk About Kevin. That also had an exploration of nature vs. nurture though, whereas this is all about someone losing their own identity, and healthy love of life, piece by piece. It has motherhood in the mix, but it's really more about how we can sometimes give too much to other people in relationships that then leave us without enough energy to properly take care of ourselves. Sometimes that is the fault of the other people, especially if they keep demanding too much of your time and attention. Sometimes it is a fault with the person who wants to keep busy and serve others while avoiding any time that could lead to some introspection.

Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson are, respectively, Grace and Jackson. The two of them move into a home left behind by Jackson's deceased uncle. It needs a lot of work done to it, but it at least feels like a good home for them to start their family. Jumping forward slightly, Grace is left at home a lot with their young son, Jackson is often working away, and things start to sour quicker than a carton of milk left on the windowsill on a scorching summer day.

Based on a book by Ariana Harwicz, Ramsay has done well to collaborate with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch on the screenplay, but quite possibly did even better to assemble a cast who all had faith in her process and were up to the challenge of portraying their characters in a convincing and natural way. The screenplay works well in terms of the structure and the strong thematic core running all the way through it, but the film works as well as it does thanks to the lack of vanity shown by Lawrence and co.

LaKeith Stanfield isn't given much to do, sadly, but is as welcome as ever in his supporting role. Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek get moments that easily remind you of how great they are, but everything steps up a level when either Pattinson or Lawrence are onscreen, with the latter particularly strong delivering a performance that could arguably be considered the best of her career. It is, however, a performance much better than the film that she's in.

I really like the work of Ramsay. She's been delivering one fantastic film after another for almost the entirety of her directorial career. Die My Love is good, and it tries to walk a line between the many clouds and the infrequent silver linings, but it doesn't ever do enough to become great. Whether due to the source material (which I am unfamiliar with, sorry) or her own choices, Ramsay feels a bit undecided about where exactly she wants to take the characters. She also blurs reality and fantasy in a way that works against the potential impact of various moments in the third act, which is a stark contrast to the way she has handled such a blurring in her previous features.

There's still a lot to enjoy and appreciate here, and many others have heaped a lot of praise on this already, but it feels like the weakest film yet from Ramsay. Perhaps she was right to be hesitant when initially offered this opportunity. It certainly feels as if she doesn't have the confidence and instincts here that have served her so well elsewhere.

6/10

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Monday, 11 January 2021

Mubi Monday: Ratcatcher (1999)

Having seen three other features from Lynne Ramsay, and not being at all disappointed by any of them (although it took me a rewatch of We Need To Talk About Kevin to fully appreciate), I was excited to finally watch this one, her feature debut.

Set in 1970s Glasgow, Ratcatcher allows us to tag along with a young boy named James (William Eadie). There are piles of physical rubbish stacking up around the estate he lives on, due to a strike by the refuse collectors, and piles of psychological litter starting to weigh more and more heavily on his mind. Sometimes seeming comfortable in the company of others close to his age, sometimes seeming to want to get as far away from everyone as possible, James interacts with, and learns from, a variety of characters, from his parents (a father who likes to drink a lot, played by Tommy Flanagan, and a mother trying to do her best for the family, played by Mandy Matthews) to a teenage lass named Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen).

Ramsay has a way of making her films look interesting and muddily beautiful, even while characters are being thoroughly dragged through the mud. I think this comes from her unwavering ability to always ground her characters in a world that is either seriously affecting them or being seriously affected by them. There's almost a symbiotic relationship between the characters she creates and the reality she puts them in. Here we get those piles of rubbish, we get a lot of shots alongside a canal, and we get homes that aren't very well looked after. Sometimes these environments are playgrounds for James, sometimes they're much worse. You don't need to put bars on the windows to imprison people who are already so unable to climb a ladder weighted down by their place in society, their family, and who they befriend during their childhood years.

Eadie, in his only feature performance (to date), is very good. He's natural and realistic onscreen, keeping a lot of things hidden below the surface, as every young boy does. Mullen is equally good, her character being someone who is trying to navigate safely through a world of boys that she has already found can be easily placated when they're thinking about sex. Flanagan and Matthews are important, as parents (good or bad) always are, and they cast shadows over a number of scenes, despite their actual screentime being relatively limited. I'll also mention young John Miller, who plays a boy named Kenny. Kenny is the most childish character shown here, and easily led astray (which reminds James of how easily his path could change), and Miller is a good fit for the role.

You might be upset by the scenes that involve rodents, and you definitely need to be in the right mood to take in the fairly dour tone (although there IS lightness and humour here and there, in small amounts), but you should definitely check this out. As you should check out every film from Ramsay, who is arguably the best female writer-director working today, and far too often forgotten in conversations that cover the very few names that people tend to remember ahead of her. Watch this movie, watch all of her movies, and start bringing her up in more film conversations.

8/10

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Monday, 17 June 2019

Mubi Monday: We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

The first time I watched We Need To Talk About Kevin I must say I wasn't that impressed. It felt like two hours spent in the company of generally unpleasant, or blinkered, characters. There was a shocking finale, an event that has reverberated throughout the entire film without viewers knowing exactly what it is until the third act, but nothing much that otherwise worked for me, although I couldn't fault it in terms of the acting and technical side of things.

It worked a lot more for me this time around. It's still a very difficult watch, deliberately so, but it's one that gives you plenty to think about and doesn't really try to offer any biased view of the main characters, which makes it even more difficult to figure out and discuss.

Based on the novel by Lionel Shriver, this is essentially a tale of nature vs nurture. Tilda Swinton plays Eva, a woman who eventually becomes a mother to Kevin (played by various actors, but it's Ezra Miller who makes the strongest impression in the teenage incarnation). Eva is married to Franklin (John C. Reilly) and it soon becomes clear that their new baby is all for daddy and not much for mummy. It's also clear that Eva isn't really feeling the strong maternal bond that is usually a given in movie depictions of motherhood. We see all of these things in flashback, because Eva leads a very different life in the here and now. She seems to be away from her family, her home and car are splattered with red paint by unknown vandals, and she is aggressively confronted/assaulted by people who pass her by in public. It's clear that something bad happened, but not clear what that is.

Director Lynne Ramsay hasn't made a bad movie. Although I used to think this was one of her lesser films, despite the praise it received, I now see it as being almost on a par with the other films I have seen from her. Ramsay has a way of perfectly balancing out film techniques and naturalism, always getting just the right cast and working in a way that suits the material. I can't ever bring myself to fully love this film, it's just the subject matter being so offputting to me in a way that causes me to feel revulsion during some scenes (and probably not the scenes that would cause others to feel revulsion), but I'm no longer going to play it down as something lesser than it really is.

Swinton is very good in her role, a mother who doesn't seem to take easily to mothering. But the beauty of the film, and the adaptation of the source material by Ramsay and Rory Stewart Kinnear, means that you're never 100% sure of that. Is she resenting her child and acting in a way that he can sense, or is the child acting so badly that his mother becomes more and more worn down by his behaviour? Reilly does well in his smaller role, giving a very typical portrayal of a parent who only sees the good in his children when he comes along in time for the better moments. He's not a bad father at all, he just doesn't ever happen to see any of the worst incidents. Although I have already mentioned Miller, who gives a performance here that may well remain a career-best for him for many years, I'll also praise Rock Duer and Jasper Newell, both playing Kevin in his younger years.

Complex, difficult, intriguing, We Need To Talk About Kevin is a film that sets out to ask questions it has no answers for. Because, perhaps most troublingly for many viewers, there often are no answers. Certainly no easy ones anyway. All we can do is manage our own behaviours, and try to do our best by those we love, and that is always going to be a more difficult, and more constant, option than finding easy answers.

8/10

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Tuesday, 3 July 2018

You Were Never Really Here (2017)

There are a lot of familiar elements in You Were Never Really Here and if I simply listed them without further explanation then you could be forgiven for thinking that this was just another retread of overheated tropes and cliches. Its a film about a man you pay to get jobs done without needing the police. There's a little girl needing saved, although she may be a lot tougher and smarter than she looks. There's betrayal. And, of course, a job goes horribly wrong. Thankfully, there's a lot more to this film than just those elements. Writer-director Lynne Ramsay, adapating a novella by Jonathan Ames, uses this storyline to explore the psychology of the main character and to show the drip drip drip of the violence and bloodshed eroding his core. But is it his mind going? His heart and soul? His humanity? Or is it possible to repair the damage?

Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe, a man who spends a lot of his time rescuing snatched children, not averse to also killing people in his way with whatever he thinks will do the job best (like a hammer, for example). He also cares for his mother (Judith Roberts). When he's asked to track down the missing daughter of a politician, he goes about things in his usual, effective manner. All seems to go well . . . until it doesn't. As he realises what he's gotten himself into, Joe becomes more and more determined to rescue the young girl (played by Ekaterina Samsonov). That's not going to end well for the criminals, but it might not end well for Joe either.

I enjoyed You Were Never Really Here while it was on. Ramsay intercuts the main narrative with a number of sequences showing fragments of flashbacks and dreams that continue to upset Joe, showing that he's a man who may never find peace. Yet she also delivers in the standard scenes of vengeance/vigilante justice. The violence is depicted in a messy and brutal way, making it all the more effective as viewers can realise what Joe goes through with every life he takes. Physical struggles that take their toll, sharp things puncturing soft tissue, blood and sweat and, yes, a few tears. It's always brief, often only the after-effects are shown, but the film remains steeped in it for much of the runtime.

The choices made by Ramsay are interesting, mainly because of how she still presents viewers with touchstones from these kinds of movies while also using every action and interaction to delve deeper into the mind of Joe, but it helps her cause immensely that she has Phoenix in the main role. He's an actor often able to give great performances and this ranks up there with one of his very best. By turns scary, vulnerable, confident, suicidal, caring, and cold-hearted, there may be other people who turn up onscreen but I can't recall many of them. Roberts and Samsonov are the others who stand out, not because of other characters being underwritten or expendable but because of how strongly they impact on the life of Joe, and therefore affect his mindset for the majority of the movie.

There's something stopping me from rating this as a perfect film just now, which isn't to say that it won't happen when I revisit it some time in the future. Everything works so beautifully, bookended by acts of violence that shock in different ways. You also get a strange and wonderful Jonny Greenwood score as the icing on the cake.

If you're a fan of Ramsay or Phoenix (and why wouldn't you be?) then you owe it to yourself to see this film. I may even come back to this review soon to round up my rating.

9/10

Buy the blu here.
Americans will be able to get it here.